Wenle Wang

Changlu Guo, Márton Szemenyei, Yangtao Hu et al.

Retinal vessel segmentation is a vital step for the diagnosis of many early eye-related diseases. In this work, we propose a new deep learning model, namely Channel Attention Residual U-Net (CAR-UNet), to accurately segment retinal vascular and non-vascular pixels. In this model, we introduced a novel Modified Efficient Channel Attention (MECA) to enhance the discriminative ability of the network by considering the interdependence between feature maps. On the one hand, we apply MECA to the "skip connections" in the traditional U-shaped networks, instead of simply copying the feature maps of the contracting path to the corresponding expansive path. On the other hand, we propose a Channel Attention Double Residual Block (CADRB), which integrates MECA into a residual structure as a core structure to construct the proposed CAR-UNet. The results show that our proposed CAR-UNet has reached the state-of-the-art performance on three publicly available retinal vessel datasets: DRIVE, CHASE DB1 and STARE.

Changlu Guo, Márton Szemenyei, Yugen Yi et al.

The precise segmentation of retinal blood vessels is of great significance for early diagnosis of eye-related diseases such as diabetes and hypertension. In this work, we propose a lightweight network named Spatial Attention U-Net (SA-UNet) that does not require thousands of annotated training samples and can be utilized in a data augmentation manner to use the available annotated samples more efficiently. SA-UNet introduces a spatial attention module which infers the attention map along the spatial dimension, and multiplies the attention map by the input feature map for adaptive feature refinement. In addition, the proposed network employs structured dropout convolutional blocks instead of the original convolutional blocks of U-Net to prevent the network from overfitting. We evaluate SA-UNet based on two benchmark retinal datasets: the Vascular Extraction (DRIVE) dataset and the Child Heart and Health Study (CHASE_DB1) dataset. The results show that the proposed SA-UNet achieves state-of-the-art performance on both datasets.The implementation and the trained networks are available on Github1.